


On my strong back, I’ll take you home

by unnieunnie



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Aggressive Caretaking, Clones adrift in the wild, Enemies to dongsaengs, Medical Experimentation, Medical Procedures, Mild Blood, Other, Responsibility complex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:40:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28441803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unnieunnie/pseuds/unnieunnie
Summary: Prompt ID: VV1-130Minseok wakes up in another world and gets taken captive by his brothers' clones, but the more he gets to know them, the more he sees his brothers in their multicolored eyes. or: Minseok being a hyung to X-EXO whether they like it or not.
Relationships: Kim Minseok | Xiumin centric, Kim Minseok |Xiumin & X-EXO
Comments: 12
Kudos: 73
Collections: Vargavinter Round 1





	On my strong back, I’ll take you home

Minseok never felt the blow that knocked him out – not until much later, of course, when he awoke with his eyes crossed and a monster of a headache that had him vomiting and weeping until someone jabbed him in the arm, and he slept again.

It wasn’t until the fourth time he woke up that he was enough himself to be embarrassed about it. Captured. How undignified. Baekhyun would never let him live it down, and Joonmyun would be so tightly wound with worry that he wouldn’t sleep for a week.

Minseok took stock of his surroundings, though his head still throbbed. Hands: untied, which allowed him to probe the tender knot at the base of his skull. Gentle exploration with fingers and tongue revealed that the hurt in his mouth was a missing molar, hot and sore. Clothing: plain blue cotton pants and shirt, no buttons, no sleeves. A curious metal bracelet with no visible clasp that hummed when he held it to his ear and made his head throb when he tried to use his ice. Room: three paces across, four paces deep. Bed, thankfully clean bedpan, barred door. No window.

His feet were bare, and the tile floor was chilly. Minseok’s teammates had always teased him about the irony of how much he hated the cold. He sat on the bed with his back against the wall, the sheets pulled around himself for warmth, and waited to see who would come.

  


It was nondescript guards, at first, with a nondescript medic in tow. The medic looked at him, set aside her metal tray of needles, and examined Minseok’s head, shone a light in his eyes.

“He’s ready,” the woman said.

They bound his hands behind him but gave him no shoes before they marched him down a dim, stone-floored hallway.

He’d been trained to withstand pain and some of the less-invasive forms of psychological torture. He was used to lack of food and sleep just by virtue of a decade fighting the Red Force. He breathed as quietly as he could make himself, tried to still his mind and quiet his own fears and provide whoever awaited as blank a slate as possible.

Minseok staggered, though, when he saw Joonmyun.

It wasn’t Joonmyun. He knew that almost immediately. Even if the man’s hair hadn’t been red and his eyes blue, the posture was all wrong. The smile was both wrong and spooky.

The doubles.

The doubles were the worst thing Red Force had ever done, in Minseok’s opinion, having had to watch his teammates falter at the sight of their own faces, watching his brothers fall rather than hurt the twins of those they loved.

The doubles: not quite right, any of them, neither in looks nor powers. Minseok had watched Chanyeol shoot flames from his hands until he fainted many times, but he never glowed under his skin like the double did. They were volatile both literally and figuratively, and they fought like maelstroms. Minseok considered himself a practical man, and it was that practicality, having seen what the doubles did to his team, that made Minseok fear them.

The Joonmyun double stared across the hallway; his pale eyes narrowed, and he tilted his head to the right. Minseok didn’t know whether the double remembered the three times they’d come face to face in the fight. He stalked over to their little group, and Minseok’s guards moved in front of him.

“What’s this?” the double asked.

His voice was raspier than Joonmyun’s: the sound of Joon exhausted, with a throat full of smoke from battle.

“He’s not for you,” the medic said.

The air smelled like rain. Minseok twisted his hands in their bonds, which did nothing but hurt his wrists. He couldn’t call up offensive powers without the use of his hands, even if he hadn’t had the bracelet. The best he could hope for to escape drowning would be to curl in on himself and hope that he could somehow make enough ice to trap a couple minutes’ worth of air.

“We have orders,” the double said.

“Orders only apply on the battlefield, Suhø,” the medic said, “he’s not for you.”

The air still smelled wet, and Minseok was frightened enough that his breath clouded in front of his face, chill meeting humidity. The double’s head was still tilted to one side while he stared. But he didn’t move. A guard tugged Minseok’s elbow, and they moved past.

It wasn’t torture: they didn’t ask him a single question. They brought him into a room that looked like a health clinic. Minseok stumbled at the doorway, his knees locking up on the instinct not to enter. Not that it did any good. The guards dragged him in, onto the gurney in the center of the room, and strapped him down.

Minseok didn’t care what these people thought about him. And if torture was going to come later, maybe their thinking he was weak to pain would prove useful. So he didn’t bother holding back his screams. Frankly, screaming was the only way he got through the part where they flipped him onto his stomach and jabbed things into his hip bones. He wondered whether that was the beginning of the torture, except that when the pain receded somewhat, one of the medics said,

“One point five liters of marrow is sufficient for the first attempt.”

After that, he lay face up, blinking into the light while they took blood out of one arm, spun it through a machine, and put the parts they didn’t want back into his other arm, where it went in stinging and cold. He thought about what they were doing, and dread made him feel as sick as the anti-coagulant in the machine did.

The Red Force medics didn’t cover him with blankets or give him juice like they did at home when he donated blood or plasma for the benefit of the wounded. He coughed with dehydration and shuddered with cold by the time they dumped him back in his cell. There was a tray of food on the floor, at least. He was able to drink the water and sip the broth out of the soup around his nausea. He was able to drag himself onto the bed and under the blanket, which, although not nearly enough to make him warm, eventually let him sleep.

A hand shook his shoulder: only once, but roughly. Minseok looked up, heard the sound of breath. From the faint light of the door he could see the outlines of heads.

He could see eye-shine, like animals, and wondered what the Red Force had done in creating these men.

“Why are you here, Ice Man?” Suhø asked, anger clear despite his quiet voice.

Minseok considered all the things he might say and their consequences. He figured that telling the truth might have the worst outcome, but in that case at least they wouldn’t be able to get much more viable material out of his body.

“They’re harvesting my DNA and stem cells,” he said. “You might have a new teammate soon.”

It caused the chaos he feared: there was a crack of thunder. The fire-user and the lightning-wielder both glowed with red lines under their skin, and for one instant of hysteria, Minseok wanted to laugh, because the lightning-wielder looked like a cat. Then it was overwhelmed a by burst of light so bright that it hurt his eyes, a rush of wind, and the soft _whump_ of Jongin’s teleportation.

Suhø cursed and slapped him, sadly on the side of his face where the tooth had been removed, so Minseok cried out. Someone hissed.

“I smell blood,” one of them muttered.

Suhø grabbed the neck of his shirt and shook him. Minseok was too weak to do anything but flop around.

“Why? Why make another?”

“To win, I suppose,” Minseok said through his swollen, bleeding mouth.

“Light,” Suhø said.

Baekhyun made motes of light that floated around him until he looked like the center of a star field. The doubles’ light-bearer glowed from within, except for a dark line that bisected his face and his shadowed eyes.

Suhø leaned in close. Minseok, for lack of any better option, swallowed the blood in his mouth, gagged on it, grimaced. He watched Suhø be curious about that, and that made some of the anger drain away.

“On the field, the order is kill,” Suhø said. “But not here. Here, you go for treatments as we do. You say we will have another. One like you, bearing frost?”

“I don’t know.”

“If we have one bearing frost, he will burn your youngest with cold, like you burned Sehůn.”

Suhø shook him again, and Minseok gagged again on the blood in his mouth.

“Sehun,” he said without meaning to. “That’s our youngest too. Did I do that?”

“Sehůn,” Suhø hissed, drawing out the different vowel.

“I’m sorry.”

There was another rumble of thunder, and the light briefly surged too bright to see.

Was he sorry, really? Minseok knew he was low on blood, exhausted and traumatized. Hardly in any shape to say anything other than his name, rank, and identification number.

But he thought about all the times when he was young and he had burned his brothers with frostbite. He had burned Sehun, who cried and tried to hide it, because Sehun was soft, but he was proud.

“I’m sorry I hurt you, Sehůn,” he said. “We hate fighting you. All of us. It hurts us to fight the faces we know and love.”

Suhø dropped him onto the bed. The others growled and recoiled. The fire user lit up; the light bearer shoved him, and the flames went out. They hustled out the door, in the absence of their teleporter, Sehůn the last to go, looking back in shadow from the doorway.

Minseok had little to do over the next several days other than mull over the whole strange episode. His captors fed him and let him bathe every 2 days. The medic examined him each day – the wounds on his hip, his eyelids and temperature. She packed the wound in his jaw so he could eat better. He knew they were waiting for him to grow more blood and marrow.

It gave him too much time to think about the doubles and their strange mannerisms. The way they had snuck into his cell, as if they didn’t want the guards to know. Did they not have free movement in this place? What did “treatments” did they receive?

Twice he woke in the night to see eye-shine in his cell: once there were two of them, once a single pair of eyes. But they didn’t respond to his soft calls, so he lay in the dark, watching the shadows that watched him, until they disappeared again.

In books, prisoners always found some way to mark the days of their captivity. Minseok found it in himself to laugh about it once: there were no sharp objects in the room, and even if there had been, he could hardly scratch lines into a ceramic-tile wall. He had no shoes, and therefore no laces. He did tease a thread from the hem of his pajama pants and tied knots in it for two days, but they took him back to the medical wing and hooked him back up to the apheresis machine for a couple hours, leaving him sick and wretched in his bed, too weak to keep track of his knotted string or his tears.

He was weak from blood loss and exhaustion after that – the next day, the medic made him drink beef broth through a straw while a guard held him upright. She threatened him with a nasogastric tube if he didn’t eat. He would’ve liked to starve himself, but his body wanted the nourishment, once he had enough broth in his stomach to counteract the nausea. His hope wanted to keep going, dammit.

Silver-shining eyes in his room, late at night.

“Why doesn’t he come for you?” the teleporter asked him.

Jongin was gentle except in defense of those he loved. He was always getting disciplined by their commanders for teleporting off-base without permission. He had a habit of zipping out to cities unaffected by conflict to fetch birthday cakes.

The alternate teleporter shoved Minseok’s shoulder, and he hissed – in annoyance, not pain, but the teleporter drew back on his heels.

“How could he find me?” Minseok answered eventually. “He has to have some kind of direction in his mind to know where to look. Why? Do you not need that?”

The teleporter scoffed.

“I mean your tracker, stupid. Did they take it out?”

Before Minseok could fully understand, the teleporter drew close again. Minseok felt his warm breath.

“Did it hurt?”

Jongin would’ve hugged him because he was sick and hurting. Jongin would call out for the others, but he always stayed with anyone sick or wounded, as long as there was no one else sick or wounded to fetch home. This one simply stayed just close enough for Minseok to feel the warmth of him but get no benefit from it.

Trackers.

If it would mean the soft _whump_ of Jongin’s travel between realities and the familiar safety of his own medical bay, with Hyoyeon and Jinki yelling at him to stay in bed, if it would mean Channie smashing his legs flat and Jon—his team members tucking his blanket too tight and yelling at him. Well. Minseok would’ve agreed to a tracker that meant an antenna sticking out of his head.

“I don’t have one,” he said.

The teleporter disappeared.

They watched the next day, lined up while the guards dragged Minseok through the hall toward another bone marrow session. He saw them looking through the windows while he screamed with the pain of it. He wasn’t surprised to wake in the middle of the night, to numerous sets of shining eyes.

“No tracker? Seriously?” one of them said.

“Not that I know of,” Minseok rasped through a dry throat.

He coughed, and someone handed him a water bottle. He drank.

“How is that true?”

Minseok felt hands on him. His first instinct was to lash out with fists – but he was sick and exhausted, and here in this strange place, at least, the doubles had offered him no harm.

As Minseok’s team had discussed over many pots of tea and many cups of soju, the doubles had rarely offered harm beyond something easily managed in sick bay with stitches or a cast – with a few notable, painful exceptions. So Minseok made himself stay loose and relaxed while the clones ran their hands over his neck, shoulders, arms.

“Nothing,” they whispered to each other.

“I can’t feel anything,” they breathed.

“They track you?” Minseok asked.

The light-bearer made a single silver orb. He stared, eyes shadowed over the scar Baekhyun gave him. He took Minseok’s hand and laid it on his own shoulder, just at the junction of his neck. Minseok felt the raised skin there, small and hard.

“What is it?” Minseok asked.

“Transmitter,” the light-bearer said. “Satellite locator. They show our location to Kāi, and he fetches us.”

Minseok’s mouth always got him into trouble.

“Who fetches Kāi?” he asked.

The light-bearer’s light went out.

“Everyone,” someone said.

They disappeared. But they came back the next night: three of them.

“How steady are your hands?” the fire-bearer asked.

Minseok felt weak as a newborn kitten, but he held hands out in front of the small flame, and they didn’t tremble.

“There will be a knife,” Kāi said. “Move as swiftly as possible.”

The lightning-bearer stepped forward and grasped Minseok’s wrist.

“This will hurt,” he said in a rasp that was a mockery of Jongdae’s voice.

Minseok shuddered even before lightning arced from the man’s fingers. The bracelet around Minseok’s wrist heated until it burned him; he felt the instant its power-dampening effects ended. Frost covered him briefly, but he didn’t even have time to shake it fully out of his eyes before Kāi grabbed him and his ears rang with the dislocation of travel.

They landed inside. Minseok stumbled when Kāi let him go and disappeared. The fire-bearer pulled his shirt off and kicked a bag toward Minseok’s feet.

“Hurry,” he said, dropping to his knees. “The tracker.”

It was a small med-pack with a hunting knife laid on top. Minseok hated it. “Hurry,” the fire-bearer kept saying, which meant there wasn’t time to disinfect the knife, it was dangerous. But the possibility of infection was less dangerous than the certainty of Red Force descending on them.

Minseok cut across the lump in the fire-bearer’s shoulder. Chanyeol would’ve yelled – this one clenched but remained silent. He scrambled away at the sound of incoming teleporters. Minseok just had time to freeze the tracker and drop it before the light-bearer knelt in front of him, tugging his shirt over his head.

Minseok tried not to think about the medical consequences of using the still-bloody knife to cut the second tracker out. Sehůn was next – the fire-bearer held his hand while Minseok cut, and the light-bearer stomped on the frozen trackers so that they shattered.

The lightning-user faced him, staring, for the process, and Minseok’s hands did shake, then. Suhø. Kāi. The last trackers shattered under boots, and something tense and awful went out of the room.

The alternates stared at each other, their strange eyes wide.

If it had been his team, Chanyeol would be whooping with relief and trying to hug all of them at once. Sehun would be trying to hide his face in Joonmyun’s neck. Jongdae would be telling everyone what a good job they’d done. Jongin would be laughing high and loud. Joon and Yixing would be trying to organize wound care around all the emoting. Kyungsoo would be patting everyone’s back, and Baek would be making the rounds, hugging everyone at least twice.

Minseok watched Kāi start to curl in on himself, like Jongin did when he was upset. He watched Sehůn reach for the fire-bearer’s hand again, then stop himself. The light-bearer and the lightning-user both stared off into the distance as if in discomfort. Suhø was watching him.

At home, Minseok and his team had made a family of each other. They were the only ones in the world with powers, other than the doubles. They had been pulled from their families so long ago that their childhood memories were mostly of the center and of each other. They’d been well cared for physically, unlike the doubles, but emotionally, whom had they ever had but one another to weather the confusion of their powers? Who else but they themselves would mourn the team members who were lost? They were balance and comfort together, occasionally crossing the line from brother into something else, but always family.

Joonmyun might be their leader, with his mind for organization and his willingness to be an absolute dickhead to them for their own good, but Minseok knew his team depended on him, the oldest, to be their rock and support.

Here were the doubles, his supposed enemies, who had rescued him from their own leaders. Had him release them from what was starting to look like bondage. And they couldn’t even hug each other.

He was still weak and sick from everything that had been done to him, and there needed to be a lot of wound-cleaning and stitching in the very near future, but Minseok felt himself stand up straighter with a new sense of purpose.

Whatever happened in the future, the immediate need was clear.

These boys needed a hyung.

And frost abilities aside, Minseok knew that was his true superpower.

  


Start with the youngest, always. The maknae was invariably the way in, and Sehůn had been trying to hold someone’s hand anyway.

“Aigoo, look at this mess,” Minseok said by way of ignoring the way Sehůn flinched when Minseok grabbed his wrist.

“Sit down here, we need to get this cleaned up and stitched. What use is a rescue if all my rescuers bleed out or succumb to infection? So unsanitary, cutting those trackers out with the same knife and not even a moment to wipe it clean in between. Still, it couldn’t be helped, I suppose, time was of the essence. Well. we’ll do what we can, hm? And thank whichever one of you was wise enough to stow the med-pack here.”

This babble got him through cleaning Sehůn’s shoulder and cooling his skin down enough that Sehůn hardly flinched at the swab with the numbing agent on it. Minseok glanced up and saw the doubles gaping at him like he’d lost his mind.

“There now, just a moment more,” he said. “They won’t be the prettiest stitches you’ve ever had, but I’ll be as swift and gentle as I can, all right?”

Someone muttered in the background, and Sehůn nodded once. Five stitches didn’t take long; Minseok wiped the wound clean again and sat back on his heels.

“Who’s next?”

He didn’t look at them while they decided. He did notice that Sehůn stayed close. He was curious who it would be and wasn’t surprised that it was Kāi.

“Cold!” Kāi squawked when Minseok laid a chilled hand over his upper arm.

“Just a bit, to dull the pain, don’t be a baby,” Minseok said.

Someone suppressed a snicker.

Kāi’s tracker had been larger than the others’ and set more deeply – it took ten stitches, and Kāi was trembling by the time Minseok finished. Minseok put an arm around him and squeezed.

“Sorry about that, you okay? You did great.”

Kāi was too startled to do more than nod.

“I can’t stitch you up unless I know your name,” Minseok said to the next one who sat in front of him, also no surprise.

“Chanyeøl,” he muttered.

“Ah, nice to meet you. Now, our Yeollie is so rambunctious that he’s covered in crooked scars from wriggling while getting stitched up, but you can be still, can’t you Chan?”

Briefly, Minseok wondered whether he had taken the sap too far, but Chanyeøl gave him a wide-eyed “yes.” These poor things didn’t even know how hungry for affection they were.

Chanyeøl was perfectly still for his stitches, and he even gave a tiny smile when told he’d done a good job.

Baëkhyun was stoic, aside from giving his name, and Suhø gave Minseok a long, considering look after his.

The lightning-bearer refused to say his name. He stood to the back with his shirt pressed against his shoulder and probably would’ve refused stitches entirely if Suhø hadn’t pulled him down.

“This is Chën,” Suhø said, and the lightning-bearer glared at him.

Minseok’s hands _did_ shake when he finally had a moment to think about it, watching the doubles clothe themselves and circulate throughout the tiny house, making sure all the windows were covered. They glanced at sidelong when they passed him. Suhø was careful not to touch him when they passed around protein bars and water bottles. The house was shabby and smelled musty, which was comforting in that it suggested long abandonment. It must’ve had a monster water tank, though, because the shower was still blessedly hot even though he climbed in after the others and stayed long enough for his tremors to subside and a crushing fatigue to make every limb feel weighted down.

He had a thousand questions, but they could wait until after he made use of the pallet he found waiting for him, neatly placed at a slight remove from the others.

At home, Minseok was the earliest riser; his only teammates who ever made an appearance on the dawn running track were Chanyeol and Kyungsoo. The doubles woke as soon as Minseok sat up, all of them silent and wary. Breakfast was protein bars and water again. Minseok’s hip ached, and he was tired all the way to his hair follicles, but he needed answers and they needed a plan.

“What is this place?”

“Empty,” Kāi said. “Just an empty place.”

“Why?”

“In case we could use it,” Suhø said.

“If we had someone to cut out the trackers fast enough,” Baëkhyun said.

“Why me? Why not someone you know?”

They frowned at each other.

“You understand,” Suhø said after a pause. “You are a weapon to them, like us.”

This was true on the surface, he supposed. Even those he thought of as friends from outside his team – Jinki, Commander Changmin, cute little Yeri from the communications team – would never sanction any of them leaving. Their purpose was to stop the Red Force from casting a shadow over the world.

But they weren’t just weapons. They were strange, a little bit apart, but always included in holidays. Nobody ever turned Chanyeol away from a basketball game or Baekhyun from a video game tournament. Anything he himself or Sehun did that might possibly result in shirts coming off always attracted a crowd.

But this group of dongsaengs couldn’t know that yet.

“Right,” he said. “So what’s the plan?”

More frowns.

“We have money for food,” Suhø said.

No plan, then.

“That’s good, well done. Gives us time to heal up a bit and get some rest. Do you know where the market is?”

“There’s a computer,” Kāi said after another round of them frowning at one another.

The computer was as old and shabby as the rest of the house, but they learned that there was a supermarket at the bottom of the hill. They argued about who would go to the supermarket at the bottom of the hill in such a way that Minseok realized none of them had ever been to one; then they argued with him about his being too weak to go.

“Nonetheless, I will,” he said. “Let’s see – “

Baëkhyun and Suhø both flinched away from his touch when he combed their hair in front of their eyes – theirs were the least strange in sunlight, and of the two, the crescent-shaped scars under Suhø’s eyes were less noticeable.

“You’ll come with me,” Minseok said.

“I will?”

“Like you said, I’m not at full strength. I need someone to help me carry the groceries back up the hill.”

Baëkhyun fussed at being made to switch clothes with him, but only half-heartedly. They all seemed surprised that he plucked a few bills from the full plastic bag and folded them into a pocket.

“Only take what you need,” he said. “Otherwise it’s like giving away your position.”

His new dongsaengs nodded like that actually made sense.

Poor Suhø craned his neck as if he’d never been outside on his own before; Minseok didn’t like the implications of that. He ducked into a stationery store on one corner and emerged to find Suhø leaning from one foot to the other in silent distress.

“Sorry, hyung didn’t mean to startle you,” Minseok said.

He used the resulting startle to slap a ballcap over Suhø’s bright red hair. For the rest of the walk down the hill, he watched Suhø fuss with the cap, adjusting its placement, until he noticed Minseok’s glance and dropped his hands, though he chewed his bottom lip.

“So, what kind of food do you like?” Minseok asked as they stepped through the doors of the supermarket.

Suhø stared around with disbelief plain on his face.

“I like when the food is warm,” he said, and Minseok’s heart broke a little. “Can we have warm food?”

“Absolutely.”

The contrast between Suhø’s silence and the expression on his face suggested that he’d been encouraged not to be curious, so Minseok babbled about all the things he placed in the cart – rice, oil, noodles, snacks. Bok choy, scallions, garlic, laver. Eggs, soup stock, one of each of the prepared side dishes that Suhø ran his fingers over.

“Is that meat?” Suhø asked, going so far as to grab Minseok’s arm. “I’ve had meat before.”

“Of course, we’ll get some. What do you like? Beef? Pork?” Minseok said.

Suhø leaned down over the plastic-wrapped packages, until he drew back to stand behind Minseok’s shoulder.

“Not the human,” he said.

It took Minseok a moment.

“Oh, it’s not,” he said, not quite suppressing the laughter in his voice. “It’s not, I swear, no one does that. I’ll show you pictures when we get home. We’ll get the beef, shall we?”

“Home?” Suhø asked quietly after Minseok had put the packages in the cart.

‘Of course,” Minseok said.

The housewares section was easier, if no less strange. Minseok let Suhø smell all the varieties of shampoo and body wash – it seemed they’d all smell like raspberries and “ocean musk” for the time being. They bought bath puffs, tooth- and hairbrushes. Suhø was mesmerized by a hanging display of bed socks, declaring them “so soft” and “so shiny” owing to the sparkly thread woven into them, so they purchased 7 pairs of those as well.

Thankfully, Minseok had brought enough money. Sadly, it was a lot to carry up the hill back to the shabby house. Halfway up, Minseok’s body remembered that it was low on bone marrow and very recently traumatized. He stopped, put his bags on the ground, and bent over to catch his breath.

Suhø took two paces before he noticed and rushed back.

“Are you compromised? Er, hyung? Are you all right?”

‘Just tired,” Minseok said.

Suhø huffed, took all the bags, and said,

“Take my arm, hyung.”

Minseok did as he was told, ducking his head to hide his smile.

“My name is Minseok,” he said when they first caught sight of the shabby house.

“Minseok hyung needs rest,” Suhø announced when they walked through the door.

There was a silence followed by a flurry, before Minseok found himself propelled by Sehůn and Kāi to the sofa and a blanket laid over his legs. Minseok fought laughter, overhearing how Suhø directed that the groceries be put away, “cold” and “not cold,” explaining what each thing was.

They made a solemn ritual of passing out the brushes and socks. Minseok was assigned a pair of blue bed socks with flying donuts on them, a yellow bath puff, and a red toothbrush. They all smelled the shampoo and bodywash and congratulated Suhø on his exciting taste.

“I want the hat tomorrow,” Baëkhyun said.

There erupted a brief, silent, vicious fight that made Minseok regret his inability to move.

“Stop it,” he said, not that anyone listened, and “I said stop.”

After a couple of repetitions, Sehůn bellowed,

“Minseok hyung said knock it off!”

And the whole group of them froze in a slapstick tableau.

“You can all have your own hat tomorrow,” he said. “You can even tell me what colors you want.”

They each shouted a different color at once, of course. And kept changing their minds while Minseok requested a glass of water, took a much-interrupted nap, and cooked dinner.

Minseok wasn’t a fraction the cook Kyungsoo was, but he could make rice and beef-noodle soup. Suhø remembered about the “not-human” meat while the soup was cooking, so they all crowded around the elderly computer to learn about pigs, then cows, then chickens, then fish. They drew the line at squid – almost literally, in that all 6 of them physically backed away from the screen.

Just as well that the oven timer went off right around then.

They didn’t know what Minseok meant by “set the table,” and “set out utensils and a bowl for everyone, and put out the side dishes” resulted in each place having chopsticks, a spoon, a fork, a steak knife, and a random kitchen implement. Every scrap of every side dish had been scraped into all the large serving bowls or onto plates, so the table was so crowded that there was no place for anyone’s rice bowl or the soup pot.

“We did it wrong,” Chanyeøl said.

“You did wonderfully,” Minseok said. “We’ll just shift things around a bit, hm?”

“It’s warm,” Kāi said happily, leaning his face down into the steam from his rice bowl.

“There’s meat,” Baëkhyun said.

“It’s meat from a cow,” Sehůn said. “Cows are quite large. Do not engage.”

“Pigs make meat too, that isn’t human meat, even if it looks like it. They’re also large, and live wild in the mountains. Do not engage,” Kāi said.

“Chickens also make meat, but they are small and can be engaged,” Chanyeøl said.

“Correct,” Suhø said. “But this meal is cow meat, that Minseok hyung made for us on our first night at home.”

“Home,” Sehůn said, sounding happy.

Minseok hoped that his sense of vertigo didn’t show on the outside as the alternates went still and stared at each other. Kāi and Chanyeøl smiled – broad, brilliant grins that made Minseok miss his teammates with a physical ache.

Chën stared at him, chewing on one of his lip rings. Minseok tried not to mind it.

Nonetheless, the doubles seemed to enjoy the meal – they ate with tentative gestures that quickly turned into enthusiasm and comments like “cow meat is good” and “warm food is pleasant.” Minseok watched them watch him eat the side dishes; he deliberately ate a bite of each so they would try them all. He watched them cringe at the salty or spicy ones, and had to direct Suhø to replenish the bowl of sauteed greens. They ate rice like they’d never had it before.

Then they left the table.

“Hey,” he said.

They turned and stared at him, all those pale and odd eyes.

“You can’t just leave all these dishes.”

Six heads tilted – all the to the right, in unison.

“We have to clean up.”

The only thing they didn’t complain about during clean-up were the pink rubber gloves – and there were only two pairs, so they fought over them. Ultimately, Suhø, Chanyeøl, Sehůn, and Baëkhyun each wore one glove. By the end of it, the dishes were clean, only one bowl was broken, and Minseok was tired enough that he snapped at Chanyeøl. They all went very still for a moment; lines glowed red on Chanyeøl’s face. He clenched his fists and moved to sit facing the wall.

  


The hardest part of it was that it was the kind of thing that would make Chanyeol cry. And Minseok was in enemy territory. He was with people who needed him, but whom he didn’t know. He was still low on blood and exhausted from captivity.

The alternates stared back and forth between him and Chanyeøl. Minseok sighed and made his hand cool. He stepped forward and put his hand on Chanyeøl’s neck, stroking slowly until the red lines and blistering heat in the air faded. Chanyeøl shuddered and looked up at him, pale eyes wide in his heat-pinkened face. Eventually, he sighed and turned back to the wall. None of them said another word for the rest of the evening.

As far as hat-shopping went the next day, Minseok – after cooking breakfast, a satisfying ritual of rice, eggs, and side dishes to the first muttered words he’d heard since the night before – refused any company and hobbled down to the stationery store to purchase one in each style or color. They also had sweatpants and t-shirts for what Minseok assumed were local sports teams.

He had to struggle to claim warm clothes for himself, so eager were they all to try everything on – until he removed his (Baëkhyun’s) shirt in the middle of the room with the rest of them. His heart pounded from the way they grabbed at him, pulling his arms out to his sides and tracing the skin at the inside of each elbow, dragging their fingers down the speed bumps of his ribs. Not violent, like back at the clinic, and not sexual in any way, though he shivered, remembering small fingers wrapped around his ribs long ago. His eyes cut to Chën without his meaning to and saw those odd eyes narrow, pierced lips pursed as if in thought.

“Where are the marks from your treatments?” Suhø asked

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Minseok said.

“Treatments,” Suhø said.

Sehůn put his arms around himself and looked unhappy at the word.

“They took from him blood components, bone marrow, and a tooth. Genetic material,” Chanyeøl said.

“No infusion marks,” Kāi said.

“How long do you remember?” Suhø asked.

“My whole life,” Minseok blurted.

Their hands withdrew from him. The doubles picked up items of clothing, one each, and scattered to the edges of the house without speaking.

Minseok changed into sweatpants and a zippered hoodie for the “Tanchon White Tigers.” He slept, and woke to find them still sitting silent and separate. They came to the table for food, and Sehůn silently washed the dishes afterward, while the rest of them returned to their corners. Minseok found Chanyeøl and Kāi asleep on the floor in the living room in the morning, sleeping where they’d sat. He tried to engage them in conversation during and after breakfast, to no avail, until finally he sighed and announced his intention to go buy more food.

Chën grabbed his arm as he put on Baëkhyun’s shoes. Minseok stared into that face: after several days of unfamiliar bath products, his hair had poufed out into a wild tangle like Jongdae’s, but Minseok could never mistake them for one another. Chën’s face was sharper, except for how the lip rings made his mouth look lush and pouty. Minseok tucked that line of thought away.

“Did you want to come with me?”

Chën shook his head, then cut his eyes down to the hand on Minseok’s forearm: scarred and small, with chipped dark polish on the nails.

“You want nail polish?”

Nod.

“What color?”

Chën shrugged, and let go as if holding Minseok’s arm had been painful. He stared at the floor.

Minseok didn’t know anything about cosmetics. Standing in front of the brightly-colored displays in the store, he regretted having tuned out Zitao’s burbling about them. Back when he was still alive, before Jongdae had brought his lightning-scarred body back to their base and packed himself away into a loud, smiling display that never let anyone in, much less the hyung who had made a home for them both in his heart and his bed.

At that thought, Minseok missed Joonmyun with a longing that was physical. He had kept them together all this time, in their fear and grief. Comforting them every time one of them got wounded. Keeping the team together enough to continue to get up and fight.

Joon would know what to do with these wary, silent men. He would know how to do more than just feed them and buy them warmer clothes. He would know what to say that would make them – do something.

“Overwhelmed?” a woman’s voice asked.

Minseok wiped his eyes and turned to bow, smiling, at the store employee. He dredged up the excuse of needing a gift and let her pull small bottles and packets off the displays. When the woman asked “what kind of girl is your niece,” Minseok couldn’t hold back his grin when the best he could come up with to describe Chën was “gloomy.” The woman nodded and added numerous dark polishes to her basket. She insisted on checking him out separately, and putting everything in a sparkly gift bag. Minseok carried it gingerly through the rest of the store and was mostly successful in not getting glitter on any of the food.

Chën, already habitually still and quiet, might as well have been a statue after he took the gift bag. Nonetheless, by the time Minseok had finished putting the fish he’d bought in its marinade, Chën was hunched over in a corner, face to the wall. When Minseok went to see, the tip of his tongue was sticking out while he carefully and messily painted the nails of his right hand dark grey.

“Let me,” Minseok said.

He sat down before he had time to think about it and took the brush from Chën’s slack fingers. Chën’s hand felt hot in his own; Minseok tried to ignore it and focus only on the little brush, making tidy lines of color on each nail.

“You have to blow on it,” Chën murmured in his raspy voice when Minseok was done.

Minseok felt heat in his ears when he lifted Chën’s hand and blew on the nails as if they were hot soup that wanted cooling. Mischief rose up in him, and he breathed chill onto Chën’s hand, grinned when Chën snatched his hand away and glared.

But before he could get up off the floor, Chën grabbed his hand, staring at Minseok’s chest with a stubborn expression. He rolled the bottles of polish around, choosing a dark bronze. Minseok watched Chën paint his nails, still wearing that stubborn expression, his movements careful. Minseok felt the hair on the back of neck stand up at the constant pressure of Chën’s fingers. He suppressed a shudder when Chën leaned in to blow on the ends of his fingers. Blood rushed in his ears.

“I want to see,” Kāi said, and dropped to the floor beside them.

Minseok breathed with something that was half annoyance and half relief at the break in mood.

Kāi wanted dark green nails; Sehůn wanted the same dark grey as Chën. By dinnertime, everyone had fancy nails, and Minseok kept startling at the sheen at the ends of his own fingers. The sense of unease was gone, and they spoke in their choppy little sentences, praising the food, their clothes, their “pretty hands.”

But they still fanned out after the meal, to sit separate and silent again.

“What do you do between missions?” Minseok asked when he couldn’t stand it anymore.

Six head tilted to one side, and they stared at him. He waited.

“Treatments,” Suhø said hesitantly.

“What do you do for fun?” Minseok pressed.

They glanced at each other, then back at him as if he’d asked them whether they wouldn’t like to dive off a high cliff.

“Entertainment?”

Chën and Suhø frowned.

“Our purpose is combat,” Baëkhyun said.

“But you don’t fight all the time,” Minseok said. “Sometimes we go months without seeing you in the field.”

“Our purpose is combat,” Baëkhyun repeated. “All actions must remain focused on combat or the preparation for such.”

Chanyeøl nodded.

“Entertainment is for real people,” he said.

“Real?” Minseok said.

He watched all six of them nod, and in all his years of fighting, Minseok had never wanted more to freeze the entire Red Force into a block of ice for Jongin to propel straight into the sun.

Well. Never more, three previous times excepted.

“Who said you’re not real?”

Six heads tilted again.

“Our purpose is combat,” Baëkhyun said yet again, as if he were speaking to a very stupid child. “Our singular purpose.”

“What do you do for – fun?” Sehůn asked.

Minseok babbled for several minutes, about Joonmyun’s art, Chanyeol playing basketball, Jongin’s passion for reading. They frowned at him in confusion the more he talked, as if they couldn’t imagine what it was like to play in a band like Jongdae or do theatre like Baekhyun.

“I learned to cook from Kyungsoo,” he said, and that finally elicited nods.

“The earth-bearer,” they murmured to one another.

It struck Minseok with a shock he’d not noticed before, although they’d all talked it over numerous times: why there were only six doubles, and only ever had been. They’d never had the benefit of Luhan’s cheerful mayhem or Kyungsoo’s steadiness. Whatever it was he himself brought to the team. And these men had never had anything of their own, either, to while away the hours between one battle and the next.

The house’s ancient computer caught his eye. He could imagine what Baekhyun and Chanyeol would say about it, that it was a piece of junk worth exactly nothing. But then, they said the same thing about Minseok’s online entertainment of choice.

Red Force would almost certainly not be monitoring a decade-old game for activity by their enemies.

But Baekhyun might be monitoring it, looking for his missing teammate.

It was a risk. They couldn’t be planning to stay in this house forever. They clearly had no intention of taking him back to the medical facility, so what was the option? Move forward. And if Minseok had any say in the matter, forward meant home.

In the shorter term, it also meant something to give to them, maybe to teach them a little bit about joy.

The computer took an age to boot up, giving him time to steel himself to his plan. He found the Flower Farm Valley site and signed into his account as the alternates crowded around him. Chën startled when the cheerful theme music played, and they murmured as the brightly colored logo gave way to the opening animation that ended with Minseok’s character stepping out his farmhouse door.

“What is this?” Chanyeøl said.

“A game.”

Minseok’s neglected online farm was covered in weeds. He moved the computer mouse around, plucking them out of the ground.

“What is the purpose of this?” Baëkhyun asked.

“Just to play,” Minseok said. “This looks terrible, I haven’t played for a long time, what a mess.”

He could barely move his arm, the way all six of them crowded in close to watch the small animated figure pick weeds and dig holes. They all jumped at the sounds when he opened the barn door.

“Small creature!” Chanyeøl said, leaning in so that his head blocked the screen. “It’s a small creature! The kind with soft hair!”

Minseok tried to remember how deadly they all were and, in that moment, failed.

“That’s a cat,” he said.

“Cat,” Chanyeøl said. “I’ve seen a cat. It was so soft. It made a sound like a machine inside its body.”

“They do that when they’re happy,” Minseok said, and despite the cotton-candy hair and strange eyes, his smile was so like Chanyeol’s that Minseok’s eyes filled with tears.

By the time he had done all the game’s chores in the barn, they had had a conversation about horses and why they were less a food animal than others, and about whether the pig and cow in the barn were for eating in the game. Also, Minseok had been slowly pushed out of the chair by Baëkhyun, who was sitting on half the seat, having been pushed halfway out by Chanyeøl. Minseok bit back his laughter and showed Baëkhyun the mouse controls, then handed it over.

“What if I break it?”

Minseok looked down into those sapphire eyes, looking up at him through white hair. The scar across the bridge of his nose was almost rakish, a pink raised line. Minseok remembered when Baekhyun had given it to him, sitting at base afterward with his hands shaking, saying, “I think I blinded him, hyung.”

Minseok touched Baëkhyun’s cheek.

“It’s just a game. Even if you mess it up, you can fix it,” he said.

Baëkhyun leaned into his touch for a breath. Then Sehůn said,

“You’d better not mess it up,”

And Minseok was jostled out of the way while they bickered over how to clean up the carrot patch.

“It’s nice when things can be fixed,” Suhø said.

  


It was 2 days later that Minseok learned what their plan was.

They’d been uneventful days – the doubles were entranced by Flower Farm Valley; Chanyeøl was well on his way to turning the farm into an animal shelter. Sehůn and Chën had both changed out the nail polish on their dominant hands, stubbornly requiring Minseok’s assistance with the new color, and Kāi had declared that he would not eat “any more water animals” ever again. Baëkhyun and Chën had traded bath puffs, to match their toothbrushes, and Minseok tried not to think about the hygiene ramifications.

Suhø was slow to rise that morning, and when he did, his skin looked pale and dry. The wounds under his eyes looked less like scars; one of them seeped a clear fluid. He stumbled while walking to the breakfast table and dropped his chopsticks.

The doubles stared at him solemnly while they ate.

“Are you ill?” Minseok asked.

“Not ill,” he said. “All is as expected.”

Minseok laid one hand on Suhø’s forehead and found it cold.

“Let’s warm you up. How about a bath? Chën, would you heat the kettle for tea?”

Suhø protested weakly at being dragged to the bathroom, then his jaw hung open when Minseok ran a hot bath.

“It’s warm,” he said.

“Of course it is,” Minseok said, and then breathed through a moment of pure frustration to realize that the house’s hot-water tank wasn’t so magical after all.

Suhø seemed to have no shyness about pulling his clothes off in front of Minseok. He took many minutes to ease into the water, his pale eyes wide until they closed along with his sigh when he finally sat. Minseok stared while he could: Suhø was whipcord-thin, pure muscle over bone, with no body hair at all. And scars everywhere. The insides of his elbows were a mess, as were his forearms. A knotty circular scar lay under one collarbone. Some of the marks on Suhø’s body, Minseok knew he had made. The stitches on his shoulder from their arrival were the neatest looking wound on him.

“Feel better?”

Suhø opened his eyes. His smile was solemn.

“This is luxury,” he said. “I’m glad to experience it.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t say earlier, about the hot water.”

Suhø cocked one eyebrow.

“It’s enough to have it now.”

“What are your symptoms?” Minseok asked. “Do you think you’ve caught something? Let me see your shoulder, could it be infected?”

There was that sad smile again.

“Not infection, Minseok hyung. Merely the way of things, without treatment.”

Alarm made Minseok break out into frost. He sat back, so he didn’t ruin Suhø’s bath.

“What?”

“Every eight days, treatment is required,” Chën said from the doorway.

Minseok watched him creep in, slide one hand into the water, and his eyebrows tilt in surprise.

“Suhø is on day nine,” Chën said. “Baëkhyun is on day eight.”

“You are on day seven,” Suhø said, and Chën nodded.

Minseok thought briefly about vomiting.

“What are the treatments?”

His voice sounded nearly ragged enough to be a double.

“Immunosuppressants, genetic stimulators, tissue modulators, full blood transfusion,” Baëkhyun said behind them.

Minseok looked up – they were all crowded in the doorway. At Chën’s nod, they came in, knelt around the tub, and murmured over the hot water. Suhø leaned his head back onto Sehůn’s shoulder.

“Every twelfth treatment, electrical stimulation of the frontal lobes for memory reset,” Chën said.

“What?”

“It doesn’t work very well,” Chanyeøl said. “We have too much neural plasticity. They take only the quiet parts. Heightened emotions, we remember.”

“Like how I burned Sehůn,” Minseok choked through his horror.

Suhø opened his eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “And how we killed the flyer, the pusher, and the one who played with time.”

“Regret is a strong emotion,” Chën said.

Minseok had a moment when there wasn’t enough air in the room. Kāi put one large, brown hand on his knee, heavy and still, until he could breathe again.

“Don’t worry, Minseok hyung,” Suhø said. “This is the way of things, as we all know. Without treatments. Thanks to you we have had a home before our ending. Warm food and shiny bed socks. There will be plenty of money left in the bag when we are all gone, for you to travel wherever you wish to go.”

“But please stay with us,” Kāi said. “So that none of us are alone.”

The rest of them murmured their agreement.

Anger plowed through him like an avalanche – that they would use him so, make him be witness to their deaths. Then more anger still, that they had lived such lives, with their memories taken from them so that only pain remained, lives without any happiness or comfort. That they would be so grateful for these merest scraps of a normal life from someone who was once their enemy.

It was just so unfair.

“You’re fortunate,” Suhø muttered sleepily. “To have lived without treatments. It’s almost worth ending, to be spared the pain of it.”

Sehůn made a noise like a choked-off sob, and Minseok realized that he was incredibly dumb.

“How many of us do you think there are?” he asked.

Even Suhø opened his eyes to frown at that.

“Eight,” Baëkhyun said. “Frost, water, light, lightning, fire, earth, travel, and wind.”

Because of course they didn’t know. Yixing was never sent out into the field. He was protected from the war like the precious asset he was, more important than any of them.

“You’re wrong. We are nine,” he said.

They frowned some more, and Minseok had to jump up from his seat, unable to stay still.

“We’re nine, and you don’t know it, because our ninth is a healer.”

Chën got it first, his eyes going wide. Then Baëkhyun grabbed Chanyeøl’s arm.

“You have no scars,” Suhø said slowly.

Minseok grinned.

“No. I don’t have scars, because Yixing healed them. Do you remember, almost two years ago: Suhø, you caught Jongin – our teleporter – you sent a wave that caught him from behind and slammed him into a building.”

The doubles nodded at each other.

“We thought we had killed him,” Suhø said.

“You almost did. You broke his back in two places.”

“But he was in our next meeting, only months later,” Chën said. “We thought him very lucky to have survived.”

“It was Yixing. Yixing healed him. Three hours after we got him home, his back was whole. He was only in bed for a week.”

They stared and stared.

“A healer,” Sehůn said. “You can fix him? You can make Suhø not end?”

“We can damn well try,” Minseok said. “And if Yixing can’t do it, we have immunosuppressants and blood bags and probably genetic stimulators too, and you can have them without getting your damn memories wiped and living off of protein bars and boredom.”

“You would take us home? With you?” Chën asked.

And Minseok didn’t really know this man, with his bi-colored eyes and his frowns and his silence. But he stepped forward anyway to take Chën’s hand.

“I will take you home with me. And we will figure this out. For all of you.”

“We are your enemies,” Baëkhyun said. “How will you stop your team from ending us on sight?”

“I will make them see.”

Minseok had never heard quite that growl come out of his own mouth before. But he didn’t begrudge it. Oh, it would be chaos – Chanyeol was quick to attack, and Jongdae’s temper could crack as suddenly as his lightning. But he would show them. He could make them listen. If nothing else, it was taking away one of the Red Force’s major advantages. Even Joonmyun would see that.

“We will go,” Sehůn said.

And in the way of all things, a maknae’s word was law.

The problem being, of course: how to get there? At first, it seemed less critical, poring over slow-loading satellite photos with Kāi on the computer while the other doubles used up all the hot water and padded through the house steaming. At dinner, they seemed almost happy, chattering about “warm food and warm water.” Minseok was glad to have made an extra large batch of soup.

They sat again at the computer after dinner. Minseok kept wracking his brain to think of the most sensible place for them to arrive – he’d go in first, of course, to prepare the way, Suhø next. They needed a spot close enough to base that no one would have to walk far, but not so close as to get shot on arrival. But,

“I can’t feel it,” Kāi kept saying.

He’d peer at the pictures, leaning in close to the screen, and frown with his eyes closed for interminable minutes after.

“I don’t know how to get there.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Minseok said.

Maybe a site of one of their battles, then. It would be far from home, but he could call, they’d send helos and medics on his word, surely. If Kāi had already been there, he could find it again –

Someone coughed; Chanyeøl cursed.

Minseok looked behind him to see Sehůn cradling a blanket-wrapped, unconscious Suhø in his lap. The wound under Suhø’s left eye was bleeding. Baëkhyun was huddled on the floor by them, his own blanket wrapped over his head, and he was visibly shivering.

Chën was staring at his reddened hand, with a dribble of blood running down his chin.

“This is too fast,” Minseok said.

Chanyeøl shook his head. No one had said how many days he was out from treatment, but his nose was red, and his white eye looked more vivid than ever, because the sclera was red.

“Perhaps there are things we don’t know,” he said, sounding sad as he laid one hand on Suhø’s leg.

“Drugs in your food,” Minseok said, feeling a dreadful certainty.

It was too fast. They had no time. They couldn’t travel singly to some far-off battlefield and wait for rescue.

“Kāi,” he said.

“I can’t.”

He was shuddering, but Minseok thought it was with distress, not illness. Not yet. Please, not yet.

“You can take us to Jongin,” he said. “Our teleporter.”

Kāi blinked those sky-blue eyes at him.

“I don’t know him.”

“You do,” Minseok insisted. “He’s the other side of you. Think about it. When you had the trackers, and you were sent to fetch them, were you going toward coordinates, or toward them?”

Kāi’s mouth dropped open. Minseok gripped his arm.

“You can do it. You have to. Find Jongin, and take us all there at once.”

Kāi grimaced and looked away.

“We need you.”

“I’ve never taken so many,” Kāi whispered.

“But you can,” Minseok said. “I know you can. Because you have to. Because that’s what will save them.”

Kāi looked over at his teammates.

“Hyung believes in you,” Minseok said, and Kāi’s stubborn expression made him feel almost cheerful.

“Huddle up,” he called out.

So what if he maneuvered himself to be the one holding up Chën? There would be troubles and heartaches and confusion to come; for the moment, Minseok would wedge himself close against that bony torso and let his heart flutter at the brief moment of Chën leaning his head on Minseok’s shoulder.

They crowded as close as they could, with Kāi holding Suhø in the center and everyone else trying to touch as much of Kāi as they could, just in case.

“Jongin,” Kāi murmured, head bent low.

A shiver ran through him, then,

“I feel him!”

Usually, teleporting was a split second of disorientation/darkness/cold. This seemed to last for ages. Minseok could only feel the parts of himself that touched others – his cheek pressed against Kāi’s back, one arm around Chën, the other wound around Baëkhyun’s arm. The sense of movement without being able to see anything made him feel sick, and he had time to wonder whether people could get stuck in this in-between place, and if so, what that would mean. An eternity spent freezing and nauseated in the dark with Chën leaning against his arm: well, it was better than the Red Force clinic, anyhow.

Just when he was convinced that they were in fact stuck in nothingness for the rest of time, they tumbled into light, warmth, and a pile of uncooperative limbs. Kāi collapsed under him, and it took Minseok a second to remember how his body worked to sit up, pulling Chën’s weakly moving form with him, off of Kāi, who lay unconscious on top of Suhø.

“What?” Jongin said. 

When Minseok looked over, it was through tears. Jongin’s wavering form looked strong and furious and more beautiful than anything in the world.

“How?”

He was moving toward the red button by every door that meant alarms and guns.

“Jongin,” Minseok croaked.

“Minseok hyung?”

Minseok understood the tone of voice, he could hardly believe it either, that this had worked.

“Not an attack,” he said. “We need Yixing.”

“You need? What?”

Minseok shook his head. Chën coughed again, deep and wracking and wet. That and the sight of Suhø’s pale, lolling face helped Minseok gather himself and slowly stand.

“Get Yixing,” he said. “Yixing, and every medic you can think of. We need blood transfusions, at the very least. Go get them, Nini, please, I’m going to lose them otherwise.”

He watched Jongin’s eyes rake over the tableau, watched his eyes narrow at the way Baëkhyun clung to Minseok’s leg, how Minseok’s hand was tangled in Chën’s hair.

 _Please_ , Minseok thought. _Please, Jongin, use your heart_.

Jongin, who snuck away from base for birthday cakes, and who never hesitated to rescue. He pressed his lips together, nodded once, and disappeared.

Minseok dropped to his knees to gather Chën and Baëkhyun close, pulled them away to let Chanyeøl lift Kāi, who was starting to move feebly, off Suhø and let Sehůn grab the unconscious leader.

“There’s a blanket behind you.”

Chanyeøl looked around, grabbed it, and wrapped it around himself and Kāi.

“What now?” Sehůn said.

Jongin’s door opened, and Yixing stepped through. He had a gun in one hand, but it was held down at his side, and the frown on his face softened when he met Minseok’s eyes.

“Now,” Minseok said, through tears and something that was almost laughter, “now everything gets better.”

**Author's Note:**

> Prompter, thanks for a perfect prompt! I hope it's what you wanted.


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